Business, Revenue, Whatever: Just Hack

One thing that has lingered in the back of my head is the axiom of the startup crowd to have a business plan, or have an idea how to make money. The pervasiveness of the advice is likely proportional to the people which make realisation late. I think it is the same as is the case in research where those who have completed their PhD's give advice to fresh graduate students to "write early, write often". Why? Writing your dissertation is hard, and as such it sucks real bad. The thing I learned about giving retrospective advice is that it doesn't matter how right you think you are, how hard the lesson was, or how generally accepted the advice is, people will generally do what they do and learn their own lessons. Talking it over with D, he made the insightful observation that a business plan, like a research plan or a software design is an exercise in forced and controlled thinking toward risk mitigation (my words). The plan, like the idea, and the design is abandoned in the presence of 'the real thing', or actual revenue stream. Abandoned may be too harsh, more likely incrementally refined or adapted, although not necessarily from the original and not necessarily in the same medium (vision going from "idea" to "about page" for example).

Something I have always believed, likely brainwashed into my all the web2.0 spin from recent years is: if you build something people want to use, then the need to devise a revenue stream is a good problem to have. The advice out there about business plans suggests that such a backwards (business perspective) way of doing things can be a painful exercise. I also believe that if you have the commitment to pull it off once, then you can do it again. The implication of this is that things like priority or allowing people to fly under you is less important, at least early on when your refining your 'mad project execution skillz'.

Making money is nice, although in my readings of retrospective startup advice I feel strong undercurrents of delusions of grandeur (it could just me my interpretation). I am not looking at taking on the world, at becoming the next Google, or even the next reddit. Covering costs would be awesome, and covering the rent is my dream! I am down for ambition and wanting to do great things, don't get me wrong. I'm not excluding grandness, not even the dream of grandness, I'm just hedge my project plans with a strong dose of pragmatism. Is that an indication of lack of ambition, lack of drive? I don't think so, although I suspect it may bound "acceptable" risk more than some.

The most important lesson I learned while working toward my PhD was there is no such thing as 'perfect' or 'correct'. I spent at year trying to get things "right" before doing any real work, and this was after I had my "great idea". The physiology of just work took me a long time to learn. The problem was I already knew it from developing software for my own use, and open source projects. My problem was applying it to 'doing research' and more importantly to 'writing'. Once I finally got it, nothing could stop me. I researched and wrote more in the next year than I had in my life up until that point. More than that, I made a lot of mistakes which meant I acquired a lot of information on the specific case of "me doing effective research".

The point is, the lesson is transferable to other domains: like translating 'ideas' into 'things' on the web. There are important differences, and lots of mistakes to make, but that is why it's fun and exciting (unknowns). Not because it may payoff and pay your bills for the rest of your life. So, whatever, just hack.